Asus Crosshair IV Extreme AMD 890FX Motherboard

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Audio Quality

Asus doesn't talk up the CIV-E's audio as a major selling point and the chip itself is a bog-standard Realtek ALC889. Its performance, therefore, caught us by surprise.

At the 44kHz/16-bit settings we didn't notice the Crosshair IV Extreme distancing itself from the competition in any significant way. Things changed at the 96kHz / 24-bit level.

At 24-bit/96kHz, however, the Crosshair IV Extreme distinguished itself by beating every other sound card / onboard audio chip that we've tested to date. We've included a breakdown of scores in particular areas below; the system's audio quality is very good across the board.

For those of you who don't feel much like clicking, the purple bar is the Crosshair IV Extreme. We ran the tests multiple times and the results remained consistent across reboots and other types of gaming / audio testing.